Driver info
Authors
- Jürgen Buchmüller (original driver)
- Dirk Best (various updates, current maintainer)
Status
The driver is mostly complete, with few remaining issues. It's also up-to-date with current coding standards in MESS and is maintained. Emulated is the graphics hardware, tape drive, the disk drive, the 16k, the 64k and the 4MB memory expansion, sound (beeps), keyboard, joysticks and the printer. An imgtool module for the VZDOS disk format is available, which supports creating, reading and writing files to disk images.
Undumped ROMs
- BASIC V1.0 (Texet TX-8000)
- BASIC V1.1 (VZ-200 in Germany)
ToDo
- Figure out which machine shipped with which version of the BASIC ROM. Currently it's a guess in most cases, we only know for sure that the Texet TX-8000 shipped with V1.0 and the German VZ-200 with V1.1.
- Lightpen support
- External keyboard
- Super hires graphics modes (a popular hack which extended the amount of graphics RAM the VZ/Laser has, enabling higher resolution graphic modes)
- Split screens seem to be not working correctly (979)
- RS232 serial
Notes
Currently, the only dumped cartridge is the DOS extension. There were probably not many others made, but there is for example the VZ Word Pro word processor.
Most software is emulated via snapshots of the memory, not real tape or disk images. It would be nice if they could be replaced by real dumps/rips.